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Most of the testimony on Tuesday, Sept. 27, during the trial of the former Albuquerque police officers who shot James Boyd came from an APD officer who was trained to talk to people with mental illnesses.

Officer Mikal Monette spent a lot of time talking to Boyd, who had a mental illness, before things went south on that day in 2014. Monette had a reputation for being the go-to officer for crisis intervention, he said, and he’d de-escalated hundreds of situations. He told the court he’d never encountered a person he couldn’t talk down.

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) — A specialized Albuquerque police unit trained to defuse dangerous encounters with suspects battling mental illness was not used in the March 16 police shooting of a homeless man.

The Albuquerque Journal reports that Barri Roberts, executive director of the Bernalillo County Forensic Intervention Consortium, said the police's Crisis Intervention Team played no role during the long standoff with 38-year-old James Boyd.